Enders Game: #POTUS @RealDonaldTrump’s ObamaCare Repeal Trump Card

Presumably, among the topics will be ObamaCare repeal and replace. President Trump might also have a few choice words for the Obama appointed federal clown in Hawaii who issued a Temporary Restraining Order on the latest executive order travel ban. The order is bad enough but the reasoning based on the Establishment Clause is entirely ridiculous. Note: before the TRO expires there might just be a new Supreme Court Justice because Neil Gorsuch gets a hearing in the Senate on Monday and maybe just maybe he will get a vote soon.

President Trump has been Trumpnado-ing through today. President Trump in Michigan spoke to automobile company workers, unions, and management. President Trump promised to unshackle the automobile industry in this country and restore it to glory. “Buy American and Hire American” said POTUS with Mostest.

POTUS Mostest Trumpest will also be on Tucker Carlson’s show tonight after an early morning of Tweeting about Rachel Maddow’s disaster Tuesday night on TrumpTaxes. Is it 2018 already?

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It’s two trains running. Two trains running along two separate tracks and President Trump ready, willing, and able, to jump from Von Ryan’s Express to the TrumpTrain. President Trump is on Von Ryan’s Express on the healthcare debate for now, but it is very easy to see that President Trump has a very good grasp on the truth in this healthcare debate and might soon jump to the TrumpTrain.

Von Ryan’s Express, TrumpTrain??? There are three must understand truths about the current healthcare debate to be put into the context of everlasting truths of politics (everlasting truth such as that the prime directive for senators and congress-critters is to be re-elected).

Healthcare debate truth #1: ObamaCare is so bad it must and will be repealed and what will replace it will be much better than ObamaCare.

Healthcare debate truth #2: The current GOP public plan to replace ObamaCare is stupid and not very bright on policy and electoral grounds but the likelihood it will pass is very great because President Trump knows how to sell and for senators and House members the next election is always around the corner.

Healthcare debate truth #3: Trust President Trump on ObamaCare repeal and replace because this guy is very smart, knows what he is doing, and wants to truly repeal ObamaCare and replace it with something that provides healthcare, not merely inaccessible health insurance.

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Don’t trust President Trump for the reason that you are a cult member of a fan club that will excuse anything he does and will defend anything he does. Trust President Trump because he is smart, has a game plan to Make America Great Again, and will repeal/replace ObamaCare. Flim-flam con man Barack Obama was a two trains type guy too. But for Obama the two trains he hopped on were personal advancement gravy trains. Those always lead to a train wreak.

So what the Hell is President Trump up to?

On Wednesday, President Trump begins his sell pitch at a big rally. Another rally is scheduled and more are likely to come. President Trump will take to the road to sell something that is not particularly good. Yes, it is better than the ObamaCare America is oppressed by. But um, is it great? Um, no.

So what the Hell is President Trump up to?

What is President Trump up to? Well, President Trump on Von Ryan’s Express has to demonstrate he is making a good faith effort to pass the current bill the House leadership under Paul Ryan has written before Trump moves to change it. That bill is a mess on several levels but President Trump has to make a good faith effort to pass it so that he can say “I tried to pass this” just before he jumps to the TrumpTrain.

President Trump knows the mess that is the health insurance plan on Von Ryan’s Express. President Trump knows it is a mess because he is listening to the critics of the plan – critics who supported him during his election bid. Still President Trump, like a good businessman, is going forward with the Ryan express package to see how it plays out. It’s an opening bid.

Recall, how the Von Ryan Express Train tracks. It is a three phase plan. Phase I is to pass the current health insurance bill via the “Reconciliation” process. Using “reconciliation” to overcome the artificial 60 vote majority necessary to pass a bill through the Senate means that supposedly only matters of a strict budgetary nature get to be in the bill.

Phase II, is one we will discuss later.

Phase III, is the mirage that at some point the Obama Dimocrats will agree to provide the 60 vote majority necessary to pass all the really good stuff in health care reform, such as tort reform and the ability for Americans to buy insurance across state lines thereby bringing competition into the reform process.

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Before we return to “what the Hell is President Trump up to?” let’s deal in this section of our analysis with the dull policy stuff. Hey, it’s only life and death, not the fun stuff we like in politics. But the policy stuff does matter. If you get bored with policy, just skip this section.

What’s the problem with the Von Ryan Express plan? First and foremost, the author. Paul Ryan. Let’s all agree that Paul Ryan is a male Nancy Pelousy. That’s unfair. Paul Ryan is smart and Paul Ryan is kinda cute unlike Nancy Pelousy. But like Nancy Pelousy, Paul Ryan could not sell lemonade in August heat, shovels in winter pre-snow storm, nor life insurance on board the Titanic in it’s last hours. Indeed the more Paul Ryan talks, the more likely the Paul Ryan train goes off the tracks.

Earlier this week the Congressional Budget Office issued it’s assessment of Ryan’s health insurance scheme. Ryan began to appear on television to laud the CBO report as wonderful. Everyone else in the administration spoke with a degree of intelligence and essentially blasted the CBO report. Paul Ryan? Well, something’s not right with that boy.

Compare and contrast Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich’s response to the CBO report:

If that’s an example of Paul Ryan “excited” we feel sorry for his wife. Paul Ryan, blue eyes aside, simply is at a par with Nancy Pelousy when it comes to believability. We don’t doubt he knows what he is talking about, but his interest appears to be to demonstrate he knows what he is talking about instead of convincing the public that he is telling the truth. Something is just not right with that boy, the way he talks and talks a little too fast and slippery.

Bottom line is that best message came from Newt. Even Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney made a better pitch than Ryan on the hostile Morning Joe show:

Mulvaney is right: Care is what matters, not coverage. It’s a critique we made of ObamaCare since 2009. ObamaCare fed the health insurance companies money forced from Americans via the coercive force of government but the insurance deductibles were so high many Americans could not access the insurance they paid dearly for.

Avik Roy, of Forbes Magazine, frequently agreed with points we made about ObamaCare. Avik Roy makes the case much better than Paul Ryan for why the CBO report is kinda useless and sorta good news:

Believe It Or Not, CBO’s Score Of House GOP Obamacare Replacement Is Better Than Expected

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that 24 million fewer people will have health insurance by 2026 under the House GOP plan to replace Obamacare. That projection is unsurprising, and quite likely overstated. But what is surprising about the CBO report is the ways in which it makes the GOP bill look better than expected, and how it points to how the bill can be improved. [snip]

The first thing to know about the CBO is that it has long had problems modeling how a competitive, individual insurance market would work. This is reflected in their frequently revised estimates as to how many people would enroll in Obamacare’s insurance exchanges.

As the below chart shows, in 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was passed, CBO estimated that 21 million people would enroll in the ACA exchanges in 2016. The actual number was closer to 10 million. Even now, CBO believes that 18 to 19 million people will soon be enrolled in the exchanges, when in fact enrollment is degrading under current law, and will likely end up stabilizing at about 10 to 11 million. [snip]

This chart is relevant to our discussion of the GOP plan in two ways. First, it shows that the CBO is far from infallible; indeed, its projections of ACA exchange enrollment have been wildly off.

Second, as CBO notes in the first paragraph of its report on the AHCA, “CBO used its March 2016 baseline with adjustments for subsequently enacted legislation, which underlies the resolution, as the benchmark to measure the cost of the legislation.” That baseline is off by 7 to 8 million in future exchange enrollment; hence, the impact of the AHCA is also off by the same amount.

An even bigger problem is that the CBO has long believed that Obamacare’s individual mandate has near-magical powers to compel people to buy health insurance. There is little evidence to support this claim.

The Ryan plan, AHCA, gets mathed by Avik Roy. Roy checks out the numbers. Roy understands the CBO is a mess that does not know its ass from its mouth. The CBO has made 24 million people mistakes before. Roy has numbers upon numbers to make his case. Roy declares the CBO estimates on who loses coverage might be off by 19 million people.

Avik Roy has many prescriptions for what ails Paul Ryan’s plan. A lot of those prescriptions are tinkering with a Rube Goldberg contraption, but unfortunately America’s health care system, or rather health insurance system is a Rube Goldberg contraption.

The bill’s arbitrary 30 percent surcharge for those who buy coverage outside of open enrollment might actually make the risk pool less stable, and ought to be replaced by a much more flexible regulatory regime.

And we haven’t even gotten to the AHCA’s profound fiscal effects. The bill would cut taxes by $1.2 trillion, and spending by $880 billion, for a net deficit reduction of $337 billion. And that’s before you take into account the macroeconomic effects that those tax cuts would have on economic growth, and thereby on greater tax revenues.

Over ensuing decades, the fiscal impact would be even greater, because the bill entails the most significant effort at entitlement reform in American history. Incoherent GOP hard-liners like Rand Paul, who claim that the AHCA is a “new entitlement,” are displaying their unseriousness about a bill that reduces federal spending by more than $2 trillion over the next 20 years.

Republicans’ latest attempt to change Obamacare is nothing more than misdirection. It replaces “subsidies” with “tax credits”, continues Medicaid expansion until an election year (when nothing gets done), and keeps the most costly items such as guaranteed issue, community rating, and no pre-existing conditions exclusion in place.

It eliminates the individual mandate and creates a new continuous coverage rule allowing insurers to charge 30% higher premiums for up to 12 months to those who have a break in insurance coverage greater than 63 days. The new rule, like the mandate tax, has no teeth.

Speaking of taxes, it eliminates almost $600 million over ten years – which is a good thing. Except for the fact that over half of that amount does nothing to reduce or influence costs of health care or health insurance. More than half ($275 million) is going back to high income earners who are currently paying more in taxes for Medicare and investment income. We should also note these two taxes aren’t indexed so as incomes rise more of us would pay these over time.

For Medicaid, it would roll back the enhanced matching rate for the expansion population. This has serious implications for states who fell hook, line, and sinker for the bait of government funding that they knew wasn’t financially sustainable. [snip]

We should have known this was going to be a poo-poo platter. Anything short of full repeal – which takes 60 senators to accomplish – is nothing more than lip service.

HH: So what can be done? I’ve talked to the Speaker, I’ve got to the Leader. I’ve talked to Cathy McMorris Rodgers is on today, Mick Mulvaney, Tom Price. They all say it’s a three-step dance because of the Senate reconciliation rule. So you know those rules. Working within the rules, how can the Senate improve its bill, or how can the House send to the Senate a bill that fits within the guardrails of reconciliation and allows for 51 votes that improves the individual market?

TC: Hugh, there is no three-phase process. There is no three-step plan. That is just political talk. It’s just politicians engaging in spin. This is why. Step one is a bill that can pass with 51 votes in the Senate. That’s what we’re working on right now. Step two, as yet unwritten regulations by Tom Price, which is going to be subject to court challenge, and therefore, perhaps the whims of the most liberal judge in America. But step three, some mythical legislation in the future that is going to garner Democratic support and help us get over 60 votes in the Senate. If we had those Democratic votes, we wouldn’t need three steps. We would just be doing that right now on this legislation altogether. That’s why it’s so important that we get this legislation right, because there is no step three. And step two is not completely under our control.

And there’s the rub. Are there three steps? Is there only a two-step? Is there only one step?

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So, what the Hell is President Trump up to? Is President Trump doing a three step waltz, a lively little country two-step, or the singular Trump stomp? Got a dance card?

President Trump has more than a dance card. President Trump has a Trump card, or two.

In an Oval Office meeting featuring leaders of conservative groups that already lining up against House Republicans’ plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, President Donald Trump revealed his plan in the event the GOP effort doesn’t succeed: Allow Obamacare to fail and let Democrats take the blame, sources at the gathering told CNN.

In his meetings with conservative leaders President Trump has repeatedly declared that he is open to negotiations. The Medicaid funding provision until 2020? That might be hauled to 2018. The “tax credits” for lower income people some see as subsidies? That might be a tougher negotiation because former Freedom Caucus member Mike Mulvaney wants that to stay.

Mike Mulvaney now works for President Trump but he has lots of credibility with his former Freedom Caucus members, who are the fiercest critics of the Ryan plan. But any negotiations with “conservatives” might lead to trouble with “moderates”:

In addition to Medicaid changes, some White House officials are also pushing for the inclusion of provisions making it easier to buy health care across state lines. Senate budget rules, however, bar the upper chamber from including on a fast-tracked bill any provisions that don’t have a significant budgetary effect.

Rep. Dave Brat on Monday told POLITICO conservatives were asking the White House to back these kinds of free-market provisions. The Virginia Republican said the Freedom Caucus is also encouraging Trump officials to press for provisions that would enact into law any deregulations Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price plans to make administratively for the insurance market.

“Trump ran on this competition across state lines, bringing the price down, and so, that is the huge piece that, I think, if we can get that in the bill, then I think we can make some progress and I think get a lot of people to yes,” Brat said.

So while GOP leaders, including Speaker Paul Ryan, adamantly support the idea of allowing people to purchase insurance across state lines, they don’t think it can be included on the replacement bill under Senate rules. [snip]

The manager’s amendments are likely to bring additional savings, according to the White House officials, and would help the plan get through the House, where the Freedom Caucus has lined up opposition against the plan. But it would likely make passage in the Senate more difficult, several Capitol Hill officials said. That’s because many Senate Republicans — and more than a few House GOP lawmakers — hail from states that took the Medicaid expansion, and they’re unlikely to support a quick phase-out of the expanded program. [snip]

Leadership sources, however, have not ruled out changes to the bill altogether, and many senior House GOP sources believe there might be a manager’s amendment. But they have to ensure the changes will get several conservatives to “yes” if it’s actually made, while maintaining moderate Republican support. They can only afford to lose 21 Republican votes.

Oy vey! What a mess. Game over! Nothing can save this. It’s over for Trump, again. Well, there are some Trump cards still left to be played.

Remember “Phase II”? Phase I is the reconciliation process to pass the turd. Phase III is the delusion of goodies at the end of the road. But we never discussed Phase II. Phase II is the Trump card no matter what happens in Phase I. With Phase II, President Trump can force reality onto everybody as the 2018 elections draw close, ever closer every day. Phase II is the Trump card:

How Trump can use Obamacare to kill Obamacare
The same executive authority the Obama administration used to implement the law may now be used to dismantle it. [snip]

“For me, it’s a mix of irony and schadenfreude,” says Josh Blackman, a law professor who’s written two books that criticized the Obama administration’s implementation of the law. “I’ve warned for years that, with a new president in the White House, the exact same powers could be used for different purposes. That’s what we’re seeing now, to a T.”

Trump’s order, which encourages Health and Human Services, the IRS and other agencies to work toward dismantling the ACA, doesn’t confer any new powers on the executive branch. But Trump explicitly instructs his agencies to use their existing powers to weaken the law “to the maximum extent permitted by law,” regardless of congressional action to repeal it.

That could be devastating to Obamacare because the Obama administration relied on its executive authority to set up the law.

“Its implementation depended critically — and depends critically — on rules and guidance that HHS and other agencies have put out,” says Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor who supports the ACA. “There are literally thousands of decisions that had to be made” by the administration — and “any decision that the Obama administration had the discretion to make, in principle, the Trump administration can revisit.”

A big, complex law always requires a lot of the details to be filled in through regulation, but that was particularly true of Obamacare. [snip]

Many of the law’s most controversial elements, like which Americans would be exempt from the mandate requiring most Americans to purchase insurance coverage, were administration decisions. Obama’s HHS secretary was also empowered to flesh out the important details about the benefits that Obamacare insurance plans were required to cover, from mental health to maternity care. Even Healthcare.gov — the much-maligned website that turned into the linchpin of Obamacare enrollment efforts — was built out through executive authority.

The vast, and at times, legally questionable decisions undertaken by the Obama administration may also set precedent for the Trump administration to do the exact same thing. Both Blackman and Bagley agree the administration’s 2013 decision to delay Obamacare’s employer mandate was unlawful; House Republicans even sued, although their challenge was thrown out in court. Trump could now cite that delay as precedent for declining to enforce provisions that he dislikes.

The Trump administration could also issue a slew of waivers to exempt Americans from the ACA’s individual mandate — although the Obama administration already broadened those exemptions in 2013, after the political outcry from Americans whose plans were canceled because they didn’t meet Obamacare criteria.

At the time, the administration said it would give hardship waivers to Americans who had difficulties paying for coverage under the ACA. But “if you define the hardship as that, then every American is facing higher premiums because of the ACA, one way or another,” says Blackman. “Obamacare is itself the hardship.”

House Republicans also sued and won an initial ruling over the Obama administration’s payments to subsidize health care costs such as co-pays and deductibles for Obamacare enrollees under a certain income level. A federal court agreed the funds were illegally appropriated; the Obama administration appealed that decision. But Trump could discontinue the appeal, and hold that over Democrats in negotiations to replace the law: If he chooses to discontinue those payments, health insurers — which would be on the hook for those payments even if the government funding dried up — would probably flee the markets or jack up prices next year. Millions of ACA customers would likely see their premiums spike and their plans become unaffordable.

“If Trump were to stop the cost-sharing payments, he could send the individual insurance markets into an immediate tailspin,” says Bagley. “It would be an extraordinary hit.”

So what do we think happens? What are the Trump cards?

We believe that Phase I, amended by a managers amendment that will improve the bill, will pass the House and Senate because failure to do so would threaten the reelection of too many Republicans (and Dims in red states too). So the Republican opposition to Phase I in both the House and Senate will fail and Phase I of repeal/replace will happen.

If we are wrong and Phase I does fail or looks like it is about to fail, President Trump can implement Phase II and thereby force a revisit of Phase I by one and all – Democrats responsible for ObamaCare and the current mess as well as Republicans. President Trump can basically gut ObamaCare like a fish via Secretary Price.

President Trump can basically agree to the federal court ruling and stop immediately the cost sharing program and thereby destroy ObamaCare with the excuse that he is obeying a federal court order. End of the world ensues for Obama Dimocrats.

There is another Trump card to play: blow up the filibuster and pass whatever you want with 51 votes in the Senate. Better to blow up the soon to be destroyed filibuster in year one of Trump than year 4 or 8. The sooner the better.

“Under the Budget Act of 1974, which is what governs reconciliation, it is the presiding officer, the vice president of the United States, who rules on what’s permissible on reconciliation and what is not. [snip]

Cruz said this process would allow Republicans to include a number of provisions that would make the health care reform bill much more attractive to conservatives.

For example, Cruz notes that Republicans could “repeal all of the insurance regulations in Obamacare that have increased premiums,” in particular one that decreased competition by preventing insurers from selling across state lines.

Any more Trump cards? Well, under immigration reform President Trump could invite doctors and medical professionals from around the world to come to America and bring down costs. You know that ol’ law of supply and demand.

As Rahm Emanuel said to Barack Obama “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Most don’t remember how “the Secretary” is sprinkled generously throughout the Affordable Care Act. Dormant cancer cells waiting to be activated. For a good summary, read Philip Klein’s excellent piece from 2010 in The American Spectator. When the bill was signed into law, Kathleen Sebelius was “the Secretary” of Health and Human Services. Not so today. Now it’s Dr. Price.

Within the bill there are 2,500 references to “the Secretary”. 700 times the Secretary “shall” do something, 200 times the Secretary “may” do something, and 139 occasions when the “Secretary determines” what should be done.

These “shall” and “may” determinations cover things like what type of insurance coverage Americans are required to have, how insurance networks and exchanges are organized, how grant money is doled out, what the “essential health benefits” that every insurance policy must cover are.

Suppose the new Secretary determines that Americans “shall” only be required to have catastrophic insurance? Or no insurance at all? What if the “essential health benefits” are left to the discretion of the purchaser of the insurance policy? What if the Secretary “determines” that there will be no insurance mandates or penalties? Or that insurance “may” be sold across state lines?

The Secretary also has discretion over “pilot programs” and “demonstration projects” for controlling costs. These include wellness plans, information technology, quality measures, and national payment for Medicaid. Perhaps throw in tort reform and a rollback of many of the many more onerous regulations strangling the medical profession. The Secretary “may” implement these reforms.

In reality, the Secretary has the statutory power to infect Obamacare with the cancer of repeal and replace, metastasizing into so many aspects of the law that what emerges is a shadow of the original bill. Repeal and replace from within.

The downside is the finite tenure of a Republican Secretary of HHS. What Secretary Price “shall” implement can be undone in the future by another Secretary Sebelius. So what? Even if Congress could somehow repeal the entire law, a future Democrat Congress and President could resurrect it, or implement something worse. That’s the cyclical nature of politics but it’s not an excuse for inaction today.

Let Congress wrangle and debate over the current bill. If their three-part plan works as advertised, Secretary Price can watch from the sidelines. If it stalls, which is quite likely, the orthopedic surgeon can fire up his bone saw and gut Obamacare from within, creating the reform he and the President “shall determine” is best for America.

A majority of online and social media defenders of Obamacare are professionals who are “paid to post,” according to a digital expert.

“Sixty percent of all the posts were made from 100 profiles, posting between the hours of 9 and 5 Pacific Time,” said Michael Brown. “They were paid to post.”

His shocking analysis was revealed on this weekend’s Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson, broadcast on Sinclair stations and streamed live Sunday at 9:30 a.m. Her upcoming show focuses on information wars and Brown was describing what happened when he had a problem with Obamacare and complained online.

Brown said that social media is used to manipulate opinion, proven in the last presidential election.

Sharyl: “What areas of the Internet are used to shape and manipulate opinion?”

Matthew Brown: “Everywhere social. Everywhere social means specific Facebook pages, but it also means the com—, it means the comment sections in every major newspaper.”

He began investigating it after his criticism of the former president’s health insurance program posted on the Obamacare Facebook page. He was hit hard by digital activists pretending to be regular people.

“Digital activists are paid employees; their purpose is to attack anyone who’s posting something contrary to the view of the page owner wants expressed,” he told Attkisson.

She reports that he evaluated 226,000 pro-Obamacare posts made by 40,000 Facebook profiles. [snip]

He blamed so-called “zombie posts,” and explained them this way: “A zombie post is a fake, purchased, or rented Facebook profile that’s expressing the views of an organization as if it was his or her own. But, when in reality, the comment being expressed is done on software and written by generally one or two people. So, the zombie posts will go out on a schedule and then they are supported by zombie likes.”

And Brown said that both sides play the posting game. “There’s no reason to believe that everybody’s not doing it.”

Op-Ed: Donald Trump just got a nice victory, thanks, of all people, to Rachel Maddow

On her Tuesday show, Rachel Maddow teased a scoop: She had Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns. It was the first time his federal returns would be released.

Small digression: MSNBC’s Maddow didn’t have them. Investigative reporter David Cay Johnston got them, and went on her show to talk about it.

Anyway, when she finally revealed what was in the taxes, it was not a huge deal. Trump earned about $150 million in income in 2005, and paid $38 million in taxes, thanks to the alternative minimum tax, which he wants to kill.

This gives Trump an effective tax rate of about 24 percent, which Johnston pointed out was roughly equal to what he and his wife, who are an upper middle class couple, pay.

And, sure, for a billionaire, you can argue that he should pay more in taxes. But, $38 million is a big number. As is $150 million in income.

There was speculation, fueled by Trump himself, that he wasn’t paying anything in taxes. That led to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton attacking him on that front.

“The only years that anybody’s ever seen were a couple of years when he had to turn them over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license, and they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax,” Clinton said in September.

Trump quickly retorted: “That makes me smart.”

But, it turns out Trump did pay taxes, at least in 2005.

For Trump, in the swirl of chaos thanks to the CBO saying the GOP health-care bill would lead to 24 million uninsured and the FBI preparing to weigh in on his accusation of President Barack Obama wire tapping him, this tax story is a welcome reprieve.

The 2005 tax return could have been an anomaly. Maybe Trump doesn’t pay this much in taxes normally. Or, maybe he usually pays more. Who knows! Either way, this story has created the appearance that Trump does in fact make a lot of money, and he pays millions in taxes.

For the next news cycle, we’re likely to see this story dominate, giving Trump some breathing room as the media had been laser focused on the GOP health-care bill’s flaws.

On Maddow’s show, Johnston suggested that Trump may have sent the tax returns to him. It seemed like an odd thing to say. But, when you look at how this is really good for Trump, maybe it’s not so crazy after all.

“Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases……
Like the 116% hike in Arizona. Also, deductibles are so high that it is practically useless. Don’t let the Schumer clowns out of this web…
Massive increases of ObamaCare will take place this year and Dems are to blame for the mess. It will fall of its own weight – be careful!”

Here we are, ten weeks later. Trump’s tactics have changed.

He realizes the GOP cannot just cynically sit on its hands and wait for Obamacare to collapse.

But I think Admin is right. Trump’s basic strategy has not changed.

If the GOP can pass a bill that everyone likes, great.

If not, Trump just runs out the clock on Obamacare, hastening its demise with a few well-aimed executive orders.

He then crafts his own bill and rams it through congress.

By then, the 2018 midterms will be perilously close.

Every congress-critter up for reelection will have to decide:

Do I vote for Trump’s bill?

Or do I explain to my angry constituents why I voted against health care reform?

On Maddow’s show, Johnston suggested that Trump may have sent the tax returns to him. It seemed like an odd thing to say. But, when you look at how this is really good for Trump, maybe it’s not so crazy after all.
——–
It is called trolling big media.

He knows their weak points, and he goes right for them.

But the time they realize they have been had he is gone.

Columbia School of Journalism celebrities have no defense against a troll.

He said the boy will notice when he’s not in a good mood and will react by using an exaggerated hand gesture and screaming, “Fake news!” Said Tapper with an underlying condemnation of the president’s maturity level, “Except, my 7-year-old knows it’s a ridiculous, childish thing.”

Trump trolls them. Big Media cannot escape Trump. Even their children hear, process, repeat, President Trump’s message and Big Media is too stupid to understand the level of penetration of the message.

The Netherlands vote today. Wilders set the terms of the election. Latest polls show Geert Wilders slipping to second or fifth place. The reason for slipping polls for Wilders? Well, it seems that the Prime Minister gained support after he cracked down on Muslims in Rotterdam and had his spat with Turkey. In other words, the Prime Minister might return to power because he moved closer to Geert Wilders.

The betting is that Wilders loses today and the Prime Minister wins reelection.

We have not followed the polling and the election in the Netherlands closely enough to write with any certainty. But in between all the anti-Wilders name calling there is this standout paragraph which should ignite red flares in Holland:

Despite a large number of undecided voters on the eve of the election, the Dutch system of proportional representation, combined with a splintering of support among a dozen or more parties, makes it likely that no one party will take more than 20 percent of the overall vote for the 150-seat parliament.

“Undecided voters” to us reads, as it did in the U.S. elections: The Secret Vote For Wilders. We’ll see soon enough if we are correct that these “undecided voters” are Wilders voters.

Here are excerpts from the article with the anti-Wilders editorializing included:

Spat With Turkey Appears to Boost Dutch Prime Minister on Eve of Election

PRE-ELECTION POLLS in the Netherlands, one day before voters choose a new parliament, suggest that Prime Minister Mark Rutte could be returned to office as the head of the country’s largest party, boosted by a wave of approval for his feud with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Rutte, who is trying to stave off a challenge from the virulently anti-Muslim xenophobe Geert Wilders, provoked fury from the Turkish government on Saturday by blocking Turkey’s foreign minister from the country. The foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, had planned to rally expatriate Turks in Rotterdam, ahead of an upcoming referendum in Turkey that would alter the Turkish constitution to give the office of the presidency more power.

After Rutte barred the foreign minister, and then expelled another Turkish minister who arrived in Rotterdam by car without permission, Erdogan first compared the Dutch to Nazis and then blamed them for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995. [snip]

Images of the Dutch police using water cannon and dogs to disperse protests by Erdogan supporters in Rotterdam angered Turkish officials, but appeared to please the tabloid press and its readers in the Netherlands. [snip]

Wilders, a former member of Rutte’s center-right VVD party who now campaigns almost exclusively on a hatred of Islam — and praised Donald Trump’s efforts to ban Muslims from the United States — helped to stoke anti-Turkish sentiment last week, when he appeared outside the Turkish embassy in The Hague, surrounded by his bodyguards, and holding a banner that read: “Stay Away — This Is Our Country.”

After Rutte’s crackdown on Erdogan supporters seemed to increase his popularity, Wilders tried to up the ante, calling for the Turkish ambassador to the Netherlands to be expelled along with his entire staff.

In response, Rutte told Wilders during a televised debate on Monday night that there was “a difference between tweeting from a couch and leading the country.” Wilders’ desire to escalate the confrontation even further, Rutte said, showed that he was not fit to lead the country.

In polling conducted after the start of the crisis, Rutte’s center-right party, the VVD, appeared to gain in projected vote-share, and seemed likely to emerge as the largest party in the next parliament, as the Wilders-led PVV slipped to second in one poll and as far as fifth in another.

Buoyed by this surge in support, Rutte told the BBC correspondent Gabriel Gatehouse on Tuesday that he expected to defeat Wilders and keep the Netherlands from following in the footsteps of Britain and the United States by handing power to anti-immigrant extremists.

Despite a large number of undecided voters on the eve of the election, the Dutch system of proportional representation, combined with a splintering of support among a dozen or more parties, makes it likely that no one party will take more than 20 percent of the overall vote for the 150-seat parliament.

Even if the polls are off, and Wilders does emerge as the leader of the largest party, political analysts put his chances of leading the next coalition government at “the square root of not much,” as Glen Newey observed in the London Review of Books.

Admin: several years ago, I went to a town hall meeting with a guy who was an undersecretary in the Clinton Administration.

He made a couple points worth noting.

The first point was that throughout the ages, there has been a relationship between government and business, and today we are at a point where the pendulum tips decisively in favor of business. This is what thrills the head of Google, Eric Schmidt, when he tells an industry audience that countries will come begging to big data.

The other point he made was that Clinton followed the prior example of Reagan in assessing economic health by focusing on the top line only, which measured the total number, rather than the subordinate ones. Had they focused below the top line they would have noticed a wide disparity between economic growth and rising unemployment.

That myopia was evident in the comments of daddy’s little girl Mika. She kept insisting that the loss of coverage was the issue, when coverage numbers mean nothing if the covered individuals cannot afford the care. In fact, she got snippy about it, failing to realize that the key metric is not affordable coverage, but affordable medical care. Obamacare ignores that outcome determinative distinction.

Therefore, House members to think twice about supporting it, with elections around the corner.
——–

I am a career physician. I spent years training and learning to be a doctor. I did it for patients. I don’t give a flip about guaranteeing the profits of insurance companies. And as a Senator, I shouldn’t, either.

But in Washington, somehow, the whole debate seems to be about getting people insurance instead of getting people health care.

Insurance doesn’t equate to health care. Just ask all the Obamacare recipients with $6,000 deductibles.

I’m sick of the insurance companies putting me on hold and telling me to talk to their representative in a foreign country. Screw that.—-Rand Paul

Venus… I’m sorry, but I think your comment to lu in last thread was unnecessarily rude. People seem to think she’s the designated punching bag, and it’s really not fair. She deserves the same basic consideration anyone else does… thx…

We need less morality police here I think. If two people want to fight it out , let them, but let’s not be the judge and jury here, that’s Admis job and so far he/she has been most excellent and not taken sides.

Venus
March 14, 2017 at 9:07 pm
——————————–
My reference to the separation of church and state was as it is defined.

Separation of church and state
The separation of church and state is a description for the distance in the relationship between organized religion and the nation state. It may refer to creating a secular state, with or without explicit reference to such separation, or to changing an existing relationship of church involvement in a state (disestablishment).
Separation of church and state – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Presumably, among the topics will be ObamaCare repeal and replace. President Trump might also have a few choice words for the Obama appointed federal clown in Hawaii who issued a Temporary Restraining Order on the latest executive order travel ban. The order is bad enough but the reasoning based on the Establishment Clause is entirely ridiculous. Note: before the TRO expires there might just be a new Supreme Court Justice because Neil Gorsuch gets a hearing in the Senate on Monday and maybe just maybe he will get a vote soon.

President Trump has been Trumpnado-ing through today. President Trump in Michigan spoke to automobile company workers, unions, and management. President Trump promised to unshackle the automobile industry in this country and restore it to glory. “Buy American and Hire American” said POTUS with Mostest.

POTUS Mostest Trumpest will also be on Tucker Carlson’s show tonight after an early morning of Tweeting about Rachel Maddow’s disaster Tuesday night on TrumpTaxes. Is it 2018 already?

President Trump has turned his attention to the Hawaii judge. Trump says he will watch what he says because otherwise he will be criticized by “these people”. “These people” he points to the Big Media cameras and declares them the most dishonest people.

Trump then says this is “judicial overreach”. Trump says the president “he or she, fortunately it will not be Hillary she” — the crowd goes wild. “Lock her up!!” chants begin.

President Trump reads directly from the statute ignored thus far by the 9th Circuit which expresses clearly that the President has the authority to do what President Trump has done.

Earlier we told you about the drama in the Senate when Senator Rand Paul objected to consideration allowing Montenegro into the NATO. Senator McCain brought up the treaty and specifically stated blocking it would benefit Vladimir Putin. When Senator Paul registered his objection, without explanation, Senator McCain said, “The senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”

Senator McCain’s Communications Director, Julia Tarallo, issued the following statement about the issue:

Senator McCain believes that the person who benefits the most from Congress’s failure to ratify Montenegro’s ascension to NATO is Vladimir Putin, whose government has sought to destroy the NATO alliance, erode confidence in America’s commitments to its allies, overthrow the duly-elected government of Montenegro, and undermine democratic institutions throughout Europe. The overwhelming majority of senators who support this treaty, and certainly the people of Montenegro, deserved an explanation from Senator Paul on the Senate floor as to why he sought to prevent this small, brave country from joining in the defense of the free world.

***** UPDATE: Senator Rand Paul responds directly:

“Currently, the United States has troops in dozens of countries and is actively fighting in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen (with the occasional drone strike in Pakistan). In addition, the United States is pledged to defend 28 countries in NATO. It is unwise to expand the monetary and military obligations of the United States given the burden of our $20 trillion debt.”

I think the “tax surprise” turned out to help Trump as stated herein. He paid a hell of a lot in taxes and made a lot of $$$-good for him. Unfortunately, Maddow and Colbert’s ratings ahave gone up since he became President as they seem to be the voice of the obstructionists and never trump crowd. I think Trump should ask them to release their tax returns.

POSTED ON MARCH 15, 2017 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN LEFTISM, LIBERALS
A LIBERAL COUP IS IN PROGRESS

Derrick Watson, a Democratic Party activist who was appointed to the federal bench in Hawaii by President Obama in 2012, has issued a purported injunction barring implementation of President Trump’s travel order. I have not yet read Watson’s opinion, and will comment on it in detail when I have done so. But I have read Trump’s order, and the idea that it somehow can be blocked by a federal judge is ridiculous. The order is absolutely within the president’s constitutional discretion.

What we are seeing here is a coup: a coup by the New Class; by the Democratic Party; by far leftists embedded in the bureaucracy and the federal judiciary. Our duly elected president has issued an order that is plainly within his constitutional powers, and leftists have conspired to abuse legal processes to block it. They are doing so in order to serve the interests of the Democratic Party and the far-left movement. This is the most fundamental challenge to democracy in our lifetimes.

Wbboei, as lawyers, we know exactly what is happening with these rulings. It is precisely the type of judicial legislation we were taught to fear and why we supposedly have a check and balance system of government. This is also why I am against life time appointments for Federal Judges.

The left has effectively used , for the most part, Obama appointed Judges to shut Trump down and McConnell and Ryan are total sell outs. Without Gorsuch on the bench(and I still have reservations about him) a 4-4 split will keep the travel restrictions ban unenforceable. The left are no better than the fascists they all to readily call Trump or anyone who opposes their agenda. They are led by forces seeking to impose Sharia law, make whites a repressed minority in the US, and label Israel and Apartheid state so she will be economically isolated. The left is everything that they claim to be against and the moderates (the few left) are weak, spineless and only want to remain in power and collect their large pensions and fees once they leave office. They could care less about anyone but themselves.

March 15, 2017 6:02 PM
Centrist Democrats struggle to draft a survival strategy
It was a secret meeting about an existential crisis.
Gathered behind closed doors in a Denver hotel, 30 conservative Democrats plotted a potential path forward for their party – an effort to devise a strategy that might help them avoid total annihilation in red states across America.

These political moderates had been called together by former Alaska Sen. Mark Begich, and they showed up out of fear that their party is growing more liberal by the day, and less interested in their centrist positions.

Over a packed three-day schedule with a battery of presentations, the U.S. senators, former federal prosecutors, mayors and top Cabinet officials from the Obama administration in attendance talked about faith and religious voters, heard from a radio host about a medium typically reserved for conservatives and considered research suggesting that liberal priorities – like student loan debt – are just not a big deal.
It was hardly a typical Democratic event. But that, Begich said, was the point.
“You can’t get the majorities back without independent and centrist Democrats. You just can’t,” Begich told McClatchy. “It’s important that we come together and figure that out without conflicting with other groups.”
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article138743333.html

thought Sean Spicer did a fairly good job today of pointing out the hypocrisy of all the reporters sitting in that press room

they all go out of their way to be hostile to DT to the point of concluding and making up stuff…and yet none of them will utter the words that “there is nothing there, DT did nothing wrong” they ignore all the officials that keep saying there is no collusion between DT and Russia…

BM is the worst I have ever seen…they have no shame at all…no conscience…like a pack of rats wanting to feed on the body of the President…

This is interesting, but confusing to me. I will need to red this several times and hope to have a better understanding at the end. I hope that you are correct about the scenario, Admin. I wish President Trump success with his plans as long as the ACA is truly repealed and replaced.

NoMoBama, in Tennessee President Trump paid more attention to the immigration TRO than to the ObamaCare repeal/replace push. PDT knows how to negotiate and get what he wants. PDT can do a great deal via Secretary Price, as our article details. Here’s some more opinion, from a Trump hater, to consider:

President Donald Trump often blasts Obamacare as a total disaster, a pathetic failure doomed to implode. But sometimes he adds a twist, suggesting that instead of trying to fix the situation, Republicans would be smarter to exploit the situation. “Let it be a disaster, because we can blame that on the Democrats,” Trump mused to the National Governors Association on February 27. “Let it implode, then let it implode in 2018 even worse … Politically, it would be a great solution.”

Trump has made similar remarks on Twitter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in an Oval Office meeting last week with conservative activists, and at a Roosevelt Room event on Monday with Americans who don’t like Obamacare. He keeps emphasizing that Republicans are “putting themselves in a very bad position” by pushing a controversial repeal bill, when they could easily let Obamacare collapse and let Democrats take the blame. [snip]

Trump has said he’s resisting the temptation, because “we have to do what’s right,” and the White House sent me its three-pronged health care plan (including “regulatory reforms to stabilize insurance markets”) as proof. [snip]

There is still a Sword of Damocles hanging above Obamacare, though, that has nothing to do with congressional legislation or Trump’s executive powers. It’s a lawsuit that now goes by the unlikely name of House v. Price, an ongoing effort by Republicans in the House of Representatives to block HHS (now run by one of those former House Republicans, Tom Price) from spending billions of dollars on Obamacare subsidies. If the lawsuit is successful, it could effectively dismantle most of the exchanges. “It’s a huge unknown,” Tavenner said. “It’s uncertainty on top of all the uncertainty.”

For now, the House and the Trump administration have agreed to put the lawsuit on hold while they push for repeal-and-replace, so the subsidies are continuing to flow. [snip]

Ultimately, the future of health care may depend on how deeply Trump believes what he says he keeps telling Ryan, Price and his White House team about the politics of Obamacare. “I tell them from a purely political standpoint, the single best thing we can do is nothing,” he told the conservatives at CPAC. “Let it implode completely. It’s already imploding!”

The point of the Trump hater’s article is that ObamaCare is failing because of Trump sabotage. That is completely untrue. ObamaCare failed because it never made sense. ObamaCare failed from conception to execution to practice. ObamaCare’s failure is not because of President Trump. President Trump is the doctor that declared ObamaCare so sick it is brain dead and will soon sign the certificate of death.

The Trump hater’s article does provide specific quotes and more evidence to buttress our published article. President Trump has a profound understanding that he holds the trump card on ObamaCare. Not the Obama Dimocrats nor Ryan – Trump holds the trump card. At any moment PDT can leave the Von Ryan Express and jump over to the TrumpTrain.

President Trump has many options available. PDT can use the lawsuit and Phase II to push through a bill in the Senate, once it passes the House. Or, PDT can forget legislation and simply destroy the remnants of ObamaCare via Secy Price. Or, PDT can abandon the House bill and push a new managers bill in the House. Or PDT can intervene with death blows against ObamaCare while a bill is in a conference committee.

PDT can intervene in Phase I, II, or III in various ways to get his way. In short PDT has many negotiating options and lots of power to get his way – one way or the other.

Papeete (AFP) – Barack Obama arrived in French Polynesia where he will spend a month at a luxury resort frequented by Hollywood stars, according to local TV channel Tahiti Nui TV.

The former US president landed on the tourist island Tahiti without his family before going to Marlon Brando’s privately owned retreat Tetiaroa atoll, which the Oscar-winning actor bought in the 1960s.

Obama has checked into the eco-friendly Brando resort, whose villas boast their own plunge pools and cost between 2,000 euros ($2,150) and 12,300 euros per night.

No political meetings have been announced during Obama’s stay and it is not clear what he plans to do during the sojourn or whether his family will join him.

Where’s Michelle? Where are the so-called Obama dogs? Did Barack eat the dogs?

President Trump has said himself on numerous occasions that Republicans could simply let Obamacare die on its own, allowing Democrats to continue to pay the political price for it. But then he always clarifies that the GOP won’t do that.

“I actually talked with [House Speaker] Paul [Ryan] and the group about just doing nothing for two years, and the Dems would come begging to do something because ’17 is going to be catastrophic price increases … and they will come to us,” Trump said in January at a Republican retreat, adding: “If we waited two years, it will explode like you’ve never seen an explosion.”

That idea was also pushed Wednesday by a sometime Trump foe, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Graham suggested letting Obamacare “collapse” on its own. “Here’s what I would prefer he do,” Graham said of Trump. “If he can’t get us in a good spot where we all feel comfortable, we’ve improved Obamacare dramatically, which we told people we would: Let it collapse.”

When Hewitt pushed back on the idea, Graham added: “Democrats are not going to lift a finger to help President Trump. I would do collapse-and-replace if you can’t get a good, solid fix to Obamacare using reconciliation.”

Hewitt’s reaction to Graham’s comments was telling, and it’s perhaps the most natural one: You can’t just let people suffer. “I think you’re misjudging the political consequences of that strategy dramatically,” Hewitt said.

It’s a fair point. The political downside to letting Obamacare die is that you’re letting the nation’s health care system deteriorate. And there are huge real-world consequences for Americans’ health and pocketbooks. That seems crass, at best. And that’s to say nothing of the other big political hurdle: The fact that Republicans will be failing to live up to their promise to repeal Obamacare. [snip]

And there’s an argument to be made that it’s not really letting Obamacare die, per se, but rather allowing people time to realize just how unworkable it is — because right now there doesn’t appear to be the urgency the GOP needs to actually pass their alternative.

And maybe Democrats, as Graham argues, would come begging to help the GOP pass a replacement if their constituents start demanding Congress do something. (Democrats, of course, would argue that Obamacare isn’t dying and will never actually collapse, but plenty of them have acknowledged it needs to be reformed in certain ways.)

Republicans could also simply argue that they tried and failed to pass their own bill, so their hands were tied. If the public support isn’t there, after all, they had no choice but to leave things as they were until the public truly demanded action.

Speaking about it in terms of letting Obamacare “die” or “collapse,” though, makes it sound more like Republicans are seeking political benefit here — like they would be playing games with something that impact real people’s lives. for their own purpose. It does sound crass. And they probably want to rethink their rhetoric.

Especially since it’s looking like this might be the only real strategy they have.

The reason why “collapse” strategy works is two-fold: One, it provides President Trump a mighty threat to use against Obama Dimocrats and Ryan Republicans at Phase I, II, or III. Two, it provides PDT a real opening to talk to the public about what Obama Dimocrats and the GOP establishment cannot get done.

Can the “collapse” strategy as described in the article prove too cruel and hurt President Trump? No, not at all. Why? Because President Trump has made it clear he wants to repeal and replace ObamaCare, but the Obama Dimocrats would rather see it collapse than replace it with something that works.

A “collapse” strategy would hurt PDT but only if he did not want to repeal/replace. PDT wants to get the job done. The public sees that. The public might not be in agreement as to what to do. But the public will rally to PDT and his repeal/replace strategy sufficiently to get the job done – after all 2018 will soon be here.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and a group of his colleagues are calling on the newly appointed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to immediately investigate how US taxpayer funds are being used by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to support Soros-backed, leftist political groups in several Eastern European countries including Macedonia and Albania. According to the letter, potentially millions of taxpayer dollars are being funneled through USAID to Soros’ Open Society Foundations with the explicit goal of pushing his progressive agenda.

But I suspect the left-leaning judicial supremacists may have pulled off a scab from a wound that now will fester. There are various expedients that could be pursued. There is nothing in the Constitution that says the U.S. has to maintain a District Court system at all. A Supreme Court, yes. There it is in Article 3. But Judge Robart’s or Judge Watson’s perch? Tell me where the Constitution specifies that. Nor does the Constitution say anything about judicial compensation; perhaps it should be zero. Who knows what the ingenuity of man might discover?—Roger Kimball

President Trump released a proposed budget on Thursday with increases in defense spending and large cuts to numerous domestic agencies and programs. According to CNN, the budget slashes:

… non-defense spending at the State Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Environmental Protection Agency and [includes] the wholesale elimination of other federal programs.

This is fantastic news. (snip)

(long list of agencies, programs cut or eliminated)

This is an impressive amount of cuts, and is illustrative of the monstrous size of government funded by the taxpayer. Government has no money beyond what it extracts from citizens — so scratch your head, and wonder how the government administrative complex managed to expand to the extent it has while your household budget stays pretty much constant. This is how $20 trillion in debt happens.

One thing is certain: the Democrats and big-government Republicans will not like this proposal. It will undoubtedly undergo changes when it gets to Congress. Let them know it is time for the taxpayer to stop subsidizing programs that are actually LEFT WING CAUSES MASQUERADING AS PUBLIC INTEREST (emphasis added).

The Democrats and progressives are funded by numerous deep pockets — let them put their money where their mouths are. They can fund their own pet causes, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or their obsessive research on climate change.

The winner of these proposed cuts is the taxpayer. Lighten their burden, and they will have more income to donate to the cause of their choice. Even if it’s PBS, or all this research that seems to provide zero deliverables for its patrons: the middle class and working families.

Brilliant. And yet the minute these cuts are announced big media pounces and announces that there will be fierce opposition and it won’t work. Fuck them. They will not listen to the rationale, show how the it is unseemly to grow these agencies at public expense while the salaries of taxpayers who pay for this largess are not growing at all. And why does government need to employ 7 people instead of 3 to increase our national debt and curtail our liberty, which is all government under Obama was good for.
———-

Thursday at the White House press briefing while answering questions about President Donald Trump’s “America First Budget,” Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney called climate change research “a waste of your money” regarding proposed cuts in that area.

Mulvaney said “A couple of different messages, when we talk about science and climate change — let’s deal with them separately. On science, we’re going to focus on the core function. There are reductions in the NIH, National Institutes of Health. Why? Because we think there’s been mission creep, we think there are things outside their core function. We think there’s tremendous opportunity for savings. We recommend a couple of facilities can be combined and there is cost savings from that.”

“Again, this comes back to the President’s business person view of government, which is if you took over this as a CEO and you look at this on a spreadsheet, and you go, ‘Why do we have all of these facilities? Why do we have seven when we can do the same job with three? Won’t that save money?’” he continued. “The answer is yes. So the part of your answer is focusing on efficiencies and focusing on doing what we do better. As to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward saying we’re not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that. So that is a specific tie to his campaign.”

President Trump has said himself on numerous occasions that Republicans could simply let Obamacare die on its own, allowing Democrats to continue to pay the political price for it. But then he always clarifies that the GOP won’t do that.
———
Well, sure, he has to say that.

“I actually talked with [House Speaker] Paul [Ryan] and the group about just doing nothing for two years, and the Dems would come begging to do something because ’17 is going to be catastrophic price increases … and they will come to us,” Trump said in January at a Republican retreat, adding: “If we waited two years, it will explode like you’ve never seen an explosion.”
———-
Yep.

That idea was also pushed Wednesday by a sometime Trump foe, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Graham suggested letting Obamacare “collapse” on its own. “Here’s what I would prefer he do,” Graham said of Trump. “If he can’t get us in a good spot where we all feel comfortable, we’ve improved Obamacare dramatically, which we told people we would: Let it collapse.”
———–
When Grahamnesty agrees with Trump on an idea, you know you’ve struck gold.

When Hewitt pushed back on the idea, Graham added: “Democrats are not going to lift a finger to help President Trump. I would do collapse-and-replace if you can’t get a good, solid fix to Obamacare using reconciliation.”
———–
Yep.

Hewitt’s reaction to Graham’s comments was telling, and it’s perhaps the most natural one: You can’t just let people suffer. “I think you’re misjudging the political consequences of that strategy dramatically,” Hewitt said.
———–
Wrong. As long as the GOP appears to be trying, they’re safe.

It’s a fair point. The political downside to letting Obamacare die is that you’re letting the nation’s health care system deteriorate. And there are huge real-world consequences for Americans’ health and pocketbooks. That seems crass, at best. And that’s to say nothing of the other big political hurdle: The fact that Republicans will be failing to live up to their promise to repeal Obamacare. [snip]
————
Health care didn’t exist pre-Obamacare?

And there’s an argument to be made that it’s not really letting Obamacare die, per se, but rather allowing people time to realize just how unworkable it is — because right now there doesn’t appear to be the urgency the GOP needs to actually pass their alternative.
————
Call it what you will.

And maybe Democrats, as Graham argues, would come begging to help the GOP pass a replacement if their constituents start demanding Congress do something. (Democrats, of course, would argue that Obamacare isn’t dying and will never actually collapse, but plenty of them have acknowledged it needs to be reformed in certain ways.)
————
Yep.

Republicans could also simply argue that they tried and failed to pass their own bill, so their hands were tied. If the public support isn’t there, after all, they had no choice but to leave things as they were until the public truly demanded action.
————
This is Trump’s strategy in a nutshell. He has to pretend he’s trying to help Ryan pass his bill.

Speaking about it in terms of letting Obamacare “die” or “collapse,” though, makes it sound more like Republicans are seeking political benefit here — like they would be playing games with something that impact real people’s lives. for their own purpose. It does sound crass. And they probably want to rethink their rhetoric.
————
Well, yeah. They should say that stuff in private. Without using phones.

Especially since it’s looking like this might be the only real strategy they have.
————
Nope. Trump has lots of trump cards to play, per Admin.

So what was wrong with the original, “Immigrants are now canceling their food stamps for fear that Trump will deport them”? Maybe it’s that one word — “illegal” — which just never seems to fit in the confines of a newspaper’s headline or a Democrat’s 140-character tweet.

Better, then, to go with the less accurate headline that simply alleges that illegals are going hungry. How much less accurate is it? The Post admits that “the evidence is still anecdotal — and The Washington Post was unable to speak directly with immigrants who chose to cancel their SNAP benefits.” [snip]

So illegals do get food stamps. Washington Post does not want Americans to know that. Illegals get food stamps. Washington Post constantly denied that is true. But their own headline informs their readers that yes “immigrants” get food stamps, only WP does not include the word “illegal”.

So illegals do get food stamps. Washington Post does not want Americans to know that. Illegals get food stamps. Washington Post constantly denied that is true. But their own headline informs their readers that yes “immigrants” get food stamps, only WP does not include the word “illegal”.
——-

LANGUAGE AS AN INSTRUMENT OF TOTALITARIANISM

As an author, George Orwell is concerned with the modern use and misuse of the English language. He notes the recognized ability of language to distort truth and deceive masses in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, and attempts to alert the public of this power in his novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four . Depicting dystopia of a totalitarian system at a complete extreme, Orwelll’s novel is essentially about psychological control of the public. In the creation of “Newspeak”, Orwell portrays the effects of recurring abuse of language by government, and demonstrates how language can be used politically to manipulate minds on a monumental scale, eventually birthing a society in which people obey the government unquestionably. As argued in his essay and actualized in the novel, language acts as an instrument of mind-control, with the goal of perpetual elimination of individual consciousness and maintenance of a totalitarian regime.

Orwell’s essay begins with the understanding that “…the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language”. In evaluating trends in current language, such as the use of pretentious diction and meaningless words, he argues that an individual morphs into a type of human machine , simply regurgitating information without involving any of his or her own thoughts. As Orwell says in the essay, “Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind” . In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, this phenomenon is depicted in the development of Newspeak. Developed chiefly to restrict the range of one’s thought and shorten memory, Newspeak is an ideal language for a totalitarian system such as the Inner Party, in which government relies heavily on the passivity of a public lacking free thought. As Orwell expects, “to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration” ; thus the Party limits such public thought, eliminating the threat of a society that can denounce government and defend itself from wrong.

In order to maintain its power, Orwell claims that a political regime uses language to produce a reduced state of individual consciousness in its residents. As it structures and places limits on ideas that an individual is capable of forming, language is established as a type of mind-control for the masses. The primary purpose of political language, to Orwell, is to eliminate individual thought and expression. In using euphemisms and metaphors, for example, which one does not create by him or herself, an individual neither creates his/her thoughts nor chooses his/her words; thus the process of thinking is completely eliminated. This idea is developed more radically in his novel in the use of Newspeak, as the Party has completely erased any forum for personal thought or expression. As one member of the party describes, “‘In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it’.”

The concept of thought control is evident throughout the novel, but is also present in Orwell’s earlier ideas about the politics of language as described in his article. He identifies that political language largely serves to “make lies sound truthful” , and draws the conclusion that political orthodoxy is preserved by the use of vagueness and insincerity in language . Orwell gives examples of how politicians can twist words to deceive people in his essay: “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside . . . this is called pacification… People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the next or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements” . Thus the use of Newspeak in Oceania similarly serves to uphold political obedience. As the Inner Party has the ability to alter the structure of language in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, it makes the conception of nonconformist and rebellious thought impossible, thus eliminating any questioning of the Party’s absolute power.
Will there ever come a point where their lies and hypocrisy catches up with them.

Both Orwell’s novel and essay carry a grave warning about the political powers of language. He uses his media to demonstrate not only how language can cloak truth, but also how language can be used as an ultimate tool for maintenance of totalitarian regimes. While language is usually thought to extend cultural considerations and improve one’s understanding of the world, Orwell’s works illustrate how it can, when used in a vicious political way, become an instrument against human consciousness.

Something else President Trump needs to deal with:
—-
On the Senate floor, McCain raged at Rand Paul: “You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin … trying to dismember this small country which has already been the subject of an attempted coup.”

But if Montenegro, awash in corruption and crime, is on the verge of an uprising or coup, why would the U.S. issue a war guarantee that could vault us into a confrontation with Russia — without a full Senate debate?

The vote that needs explaining here is not Rand Paul’s.

It is the votes of those senators who are handing out U.S.-NATO war guarantees to countries most Americans could not find on a map.

Is no one besides Sen. Paul asking the relevant questions here?

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What vital U.S. interest is imperiled in who comes to power in Podgorica, Montenegro? Why cannot Europe handle this problem in its own back yard?

Has President Trump given McCain, who wanted President Bush to intervene in a Russia-Georgia war — over South Ossetia! — carte blanche to hand out war guarantees to unstable Balkan states?

Did Trump approve the expansion of NATO into all the successor states born of the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia?

Or is McCain hijacking U.S. foreign policy on NATO and Russia?

President Trump should tell the Senate: No more admissions to NATO, no more U.S. war guarantees, unless I have recommended or approved them. Foreign policy is made in the White House, not on the Senate floor.

Indeed, what happened to the foreign policy America voted for — rapprochement with Russia, an end to U.S. wars in the Middle East, and having rich allies share more of the cost of their own defense?

Pelosi: Trump Budget Is Systemic Deconstruction of the Federal Government & Its Role’
——–
Exactly.

And we are thrilled about it.

Featherbedding is the practice of hiring more workers than are needed to perform a given job, or to adopt work procedures which appear pointless, complex and time-consuming merely to employ additional workers.[1] The term “make-work” is sometimes used as a synonym for featherbedding.

The term “featherbedding” is usually used by management to describe behaviors and rules sought by workers.[2] The term may equally apply to mid- and upper-level management, particularly in regard to top-heavy and “bloated” levels of middle- and upper-level management. But the term is best applied to those legions of rent seeking bureaucrats who live large at public expense and contribute nothing of value.

Rachel Dolezal – the white woman, who spent years posing as a black civil rights leader – has reportedly changed her name to Nkechi Amare Diallo, a West African moniker that mean “gift of God.”
According to documents published by the Daily Mail, the former NAACP president legally changed her name in a Washington state court last October.

News of Dolezal’s name change comes on the heels of reports that the former African-American culture instructor is jobless, on welfare, and on the brink of homelessness.

After applying for nearly 100 jobs, Dolezal says the only employment opportunities she’s received are from porn and reality TV agents. Her memoir, In Full Color, was rejected by 30 publishing houses before one said it was willing to print.

“There’s no protected class for me,” Dolezal told the Guardian. “I’m this generic, ambiguous scapegoat for white people to call me a race traitor and take out their hostility on. And I’m a target for anger and pain about white people from the black community. It’s like I am the worst of all these worlds.”

Despite discarding her family and wrecking her career, Dolezal is defiant and unapologetic about her decision to identify as a black woman.

“I’m not going to stoop and apologize and grovel and feel bad about it,” she said. “I would just be going back to when I was little, and had to be what everybody else told me I should be – to make them happy.”

The court order from Hawaii is a pre-fabricated political screed from a lawfare judge selected to deliver a new legal theory. Or something. Obviously on its face crafted to keep the open borders going, the refugee/immigration bucks industry rolling in, and to keep US territory helpless against terrorism, there is another perhaps more dangerous element. This judge demands political speech be punished. And not just the speaker but those who agree with it, voted for it or even tolerate it.

This apparatchik appointed by Obama, who was in his law school class, is basing a national security legal decision based on speech he didn’t like and wants censored and forbidden. It doesn’t even have to be your own speech but that of a friend, supporter, voter, representative, etc. If a judge can punish you for something said last year, and not even directly by you, what exactly can he not do to you punitively? On anything? To shut you up.

This is beyond political correctness. It is an assault on the First Amendment, free association, and the worst sort of censorship. What a piss pot punk authoritarian he is. This is the essence of progressive globalism promoting one world and one thought. And what is with Obama hanging out in Hawaii while this “decision” was being cooked up and then he takes off for French territory where he is untraceable.

The immigration industry (and the slow witted WaPo) figured out belatedly that drawing benefits illegally, being a public drain on taxpayers is enough to get you deported PLUS being in the country illegally. Having a few (or a lot) of US territory born children, is not going to keep them in the US especially if they have a rap sheet or pending criminal charges. It was “just one of those things DUI vehicular homicide” is not going to be overlooked nor is benefit theft or shop lifting. The food stamp rolls, Sec 8 housing, free anything paid for by tax payers, gives the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement YOUR ADDRESS! stupids. The HHS memo dated February 17, 2017 clearly states that NO criminal illegals would get a pass to stay in the US.

And who cannot hoot with laughter at the California Criminal Court system, telling ICE “Leave our criminals ALONE! They are our criminals, we get money for dealing with them, DO NOT f’ up our gravy train!” Sleazy lawyers, all court appointed and paid with tax payer money, or even better private attorneys who haven’t been paid yet by their illegal alien clients, court clerks, and idiot judges warning ICE to not hang around in a public place outside of public buildings (also paid for by taxpayers) picking up illegals showing up for their CRIMINAL proceedings. Next California will want to forbid the federal government from accessing their mugshots (to identify them), looking at the court dockets for the scheduling to haul them off, the drivers license data base (the feds paid for a lot of it so have full access) for verification and home addresses, etc. By being “inclusive” and accommodating to illegals, the state of California has documented deportation cases for INS. Now their ass is in a crack. Show up and get deported, don’t show get arrested and get deported. Who’d a thunk it. Thank you idiotic Democrats in California. Cause and effect you dummies. And “turning in” their food stamps does not make the public record go away nor the crime. There is still a paper trail for deportation administrative court.

This is beyond political correctness. It is an assault on the First Amendment, free association, and the worst sort of censorship. ……. This is the essence of progressive globalism promoting one world and one thought.

http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-briefing-was-all-on-sensitive-matters-sen-feinstein-tight-lipped-after-comey-meeting/
Look at Feinstein’s face making her little statement after the classified briefing by Comey. Then watch again and watch Grassley. He is very solicitous towards her but he is not at all shook up like she is. And this is going down at roughly the same time Obama is disappearing into the South Pacific which is his childhood home region (Hawaii, Indonesia, etc). One of his Hollywood pal’s 300 million dollar yacht was docked at the old Brando atoll too. Nice way to disappear or get away from US jurisdiction. I’m probably wrong reading anything into this, I frequently am wrong, but I don’t believe in coincidences.

Mormaer
March 17, 2017 at 5:53 am
———–
Question: what are the common elements between the little judge in Hawaii (the mouse that roared), and the little judge in Maryland (the rat that shat) both of whom went out on a limb to let terrorists into our country so they can kill citizens?

1. none of them are white

2. both of them went to Harvard Law school at same time

3. both of them were appointed by Obama

4. both of them are left wing ideologues

5. Harvard Law School has decided there are too many white men in the ranks of the legal profession, and are therefore throwing out the LSAT Admissions test in favor of a minority friendly test called the GTE. These two suckling pigs were weened on this sort of tribalism. The other thing that is going on, which was noted by Christian Adams, is the change in the Harvard curriculum away from the traditional one to a new curriculum which equips them to be world bureaucrats.

Question: knowing that to be the case, do you really believe that they did not conspire with each other to thwart the Trump agenda? I think the question answers itself.

2/ There is no Mafia. This is just anti Italian discrimination.—Joseph Columbo

The second lie was exposed by the testimony of Joe Valachi. He appeared before Congress with charts and testimony. After that, the bad guys could no longer rely on their blackmail of J Edgar Hoover over his ungoing romp in the hay with Toland, his second in command, because the truth was finally exposed. The thought of J.Edgar in a pink dress leaves something to be desired, although I am sure Ann Wintow would find something nice to say about it, and offer him a modeling gig on the runway.

Likewise, if Trump exposed the machinations of deep state in a similar hearing before Congress, televised for all in the nation to see, and showing how those lies are leaked to David Ignatius of the Washington Post then perhaps the nation would reject categorically the daily missile barrage if lies launched by the deep state, and recognize that this is not robust political debate it is sedition writ large, which threatens the welfare of the nation.

Dare I hope that the Republicans in Congress could handle something like that? Color me stupid, but perhaps they could, with a little encouragement from a certain man at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If so, then that could be a game changer, because as Brandeis so aptly put it, sunlight is the best policeman, and fresh air is the best disinfectant.

Five 9th Circuit Judges Dish Out Ruthless Take Down to Anti-Trump Travel Ban Decision

by Robert Barnes | 8:56 am, March 16th, 2017

In one of the most ruthless opinions issued of fellow panel judges, five judges from across the political spectrum in the Ninth Circuit went out of their way to issue an opinion about a dismissed appeal, to remind everybody just how embarrassingly bad the prior Ninth Circuit stay panel decision was on Trump’s travel ban. The five judges included the famed, and most respected intellectual amongst the Ninth Circuit, Alex Kozinski. The others included Jay Bybee, Consuelo Callahan, Carlos Bea and Sandra Ikuta. Nobody other than the original panel came to the defense of the original panel decision, a less than promising start for future approvals of district court interference in Presidential immigration policy.

The language of the opinion was almost Scalian: the five Ninth Circuit judges noted their “obligation to correct” the “manifest” errors so bad that the “fundamental” errors “confound Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent.” The district court questioned any judge issuing a “nationwide TRO” “without making findings of fact or conclusions of law” on the merits of the matter and conducting published opinions on seminal matters of national security based on “oral argument by phone involving four time zones.”

Aside from the procedural defects of the process, the five panel jurists then noted the deep legal problems with the panel’s order: its a-historicity, it’s abdication of precedent, and its usurpation of Constitutionally delegated Presidential rights. Mirroring much of the Boston judge’s decision, the five judges then detail and outline what other critics, skeptics and commentators have noted of the prior panel decision, including critical commentary from liberal law professors and scribes Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz, and Jeffrey Toobin. The original 3-judge panel “neglected or overlooked critical cases by the Supreme Court and by our making clear that when we are reviewing decisions about who may be admitted into the United States, we must defer to the judgment of the political branches.” Of particular note, the five panel judges note how the 3-judge panel decision in “compounding its omission” of Supreme Court decisions and relevant sister Circuit precedents, also “missed all of our own cases” on the subject. The 5 judges conclude the panel engaged in a “clear misstatement of law” so bad it compelled “vacating” an opinion usually mooted by a dismissed case.

The five judges note some of the absurdities in the original 3-judge panel decision: claiming a consular officer must be deferred to more than the President of the United States; claiming first amendment rights exist for foreigners when the Supreme Court twice ruled otherwise; the claim that people here could claim a constitutional right for someone else to travel here, a decision specifically rejected by the Supreme Court just a year ago; and analogous Trumpian kind of immigration exclusion was uniformly approved by Circuit courts across the country in decisions issued between 2003 and 2008. As the five panelists conclude, the overwhelming precedent and legal history reveals a court simply cannot “apply ordinary constitutional standards to immigration policy.”

The five judges don’t quit there, though. They go on to identify other “obvious” errors. As the 5 judges note, the 3-judge panel hid from the most important statute, noting the 3-judge panel “regrettably” “never once mentioned” the most important statutory authority: section 1182(f) of title 8. Additionally, the 3-judge panel failed to even note the important Presidential power over immigration that all courts, Congress, and the Constitution expressly and explicitly gave him in all of its prior precedents.

Unsatisfied with that harsh condemnation, the five judges go even further. The judges concur with the Boston judge’s understanding of “rational basis” review, and condemn the Seattle judge’s and the 3-judge panel’s misapplication and elemental misunderstanding of what “rational basis” is. As the 5 judges note, “so long as there is one facially legitimate and bona fide reason for the President’s actions, our inquiry is at an end.” The issue is whether a reason is given, not whether a judge likes or agree with that reason. That means the executive order sufficed, and no further consideration of the reasons for Trump’s order were allowed.

The five judges still weren’t finished. Next up, the ludicrous suggestion the President had to produce classified and national security information to explain and explicate publicly all the empirical reasons he felt the order needed for safety rationales. As the five judges panel note, judges are not New York Times editors here to substitute for the President at their unelected will. A gavel is not a gun; a judge is not the commander in chief. And, again the 5 panel judges noted the Supreme Court specifically condemned just this kind of demand from judges — demanding classified information to second guess executively privileged decisions. As the court concluded, “the President does not have to come forward with supporting documentation to explain the basis for the Executive Order.”

The panel wraps up its ruthless condemnation of its fellow 3-panel decision by noting their errors are “many and obvious,” including the failure to even “apply the proper standard” of review. As the five judges wisely note: “we are judges, not Platonic guardians,” and the great losers of the 3-panel decision are those that believe elections matter and the rule of law deserves respect, as both were sacrificed for results-oriented judges who ignored the law and evaded the historical precedent to try to reverse the policy outcome of the recent election.

Robert Barnes is a California-based trial attorney whose practice focuses on Constitutional, criminal and civil rights law. You can follow him at @Barnes_Law

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something tells me the 9th circuit court is getting very nervous about being ‘broken up’

after this rebuke of the first judge’s ruling…good luck to O’s two flunkie college friends and their nonsensical second try…

if the 9th court panel is smart…they will resolve this conflict in favor of President Trump asap…

This stuff is really angering me. And the culture is such that they can be so brazen in their racism.

People like that need to grow up. Ireland is a white culture, deal with it. They have no problem with black, Asian, or “hispanic” cultures. And they have the FREEDOM due to WHITE WESTERN CULTURES to move if they don’t like it here. And exactly what color race created the most evolved WESTERN cultures???

Worst than Obama becoming president was that there were so many people willing to elect an un-American, unqualified, unvetted idiot.

I’m now starting to think that these people’s racism against whites is not the worst thing – the worst thing is that p.c. has gotten so bad that they can be so brazen and not be shouted down.

TCM has a great lineup today of good films of this type. “Daughter of Rosie O’Grady” with Tyrone Power was on earlier. “Quiet Man” with John Wayne will be on tonight (hard to believe John Ford had trouble getting this on the screen).

Of more recent vintage the wonderful film “Brooklyn” is highly recommended. The film is about a young woman Irish immigrant (here legally) and her homesickness, and new life in Brooklyn. It’s a film that speaks to the immigrant experience for everyone, not just the Irish. Lovely film released in 2015.

The most important part of Judge Bybee’s dissent from denial of en banc review in Washington v. Trump

As Eugene notes below, this week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined to grant an en banc rehearing in Washington v. Trump, the decision temporarily restraining the Trump administration’s first immigration executive order, which has since been replaced with a revised order. The case itself is now moot, but the original panel decision remains as 9th Circuit precedent.

Five justices dissented from the denial of en banc review, arguing that the panel decision made multiple legal errors and should be vacated. In my opinion, Judge Bybee’s opinion, joined by Judges Bea, Callahan, Ikuta and Kozinski, makes a fairly persuasive case under current law, but readers may judge for themselves.

Apart from the legal arguments, Bybee’s dissent also comments on the broader context in which this litigation has occurred. Whatever one’s view of the president, his immigration policies, and the resulting legal disputes, this portion of the opinion is well worth a read. I’ve reproduced it below.

We are all acutely aware of the enormous controversy and chaos that attended the issuance of the Executive Order. People contested the extent of the national security interests at stake, and they debated the value that the Executive Order added to our security against the real suffering of potential emigres. As tempting as it is to use the judicial power to balance those competing interests as we see fit, we cannot let our personal inclinations get ahead of important, overarching principles about who gets to make decisions in our democracy. For better or worse, every four years we hold a contested presidential election. We have all found ourselves disappointed with the election results in one election cycle or another. But it is the best of American traditions that we also understand and respect the consequences of our elections. Even when we disagree with the judgment of the political branches—and perhaps especially when we disagree—we have to trust that the wisdom of the nation as a whole will prevail in the end.

Above all, in a democracy, we have the duty to preserve the liberty of the people by keeping the enormous powers of the national government separated. We are judges, not Platonic Guardians. It is our duty to say what the law is, and the meta-source of our law, the U.S. Constitution, commits the power to make foreign policy, including the decisions to permit or forbid entry into the United States, to the President and Congress. We will yet regret not having taken this case en banc to keep those lines of authority straight.

Finally, I wish to comment on the public discourse that has surrounded these proceedings. The panel addressed the government’s request for a stay under the worst conditions imaginable, including extraordinarily compressed briefing and argument schedules and the most intense public scrutiny of our court that I can remember. Even as I dissent from our decision not to vacate the panel’s flawed opinion, I have the greatest respect for my colleagues. The personal attacks on the distinguished district judge and our colleagues were out of all bounds of civic and persuasive discourse—particularly when they came from the parties. It does no credit to the arguments of the parties to impugn the motives or the competence of the members of this court; ad hominem attacks are not a substitute for effective advocacy. Such personal attacks treat the court as though it were merely a political forum in which bargaining, compromise, and even intimidation are acceptable principles. The courts of law must be more than that, or we are not governed by law at all.

This statement deserves a wide readership, including at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

We’ll dissent from the dissent in one respect. The “personal attacks” on the district court and the 9th Circuit are entirely justified precisely because the district court and the 9th Circus acted as a “political forum” not a court of LAW.

We note only 5 members of the 29 members of the Circuit joined in this dissent. This dissent is basic law yet only 5 of the members signed on to it. No respect is due to the usurpers who stole power for themselves and assaulted the people of the United States with their power grab.

Judge Derrick Watson’s imaginative reasoning asserts a new power to disregard formal law if the president’s words create a basis for mistrusting his motives.

Let’s start with the law.

The president of the United States has power to bar “any class of aliens” both as immigrants and as nonimmigrants and to impose on their ordinary comings and goings “any restrictions he may deem appropriate.”

That’s the language of the U.S. Code, the law of the land as enacted by Congress, under Congress’ own constitutional power over immigration and naturalization.

Presidential power is never absolute, of course. It’s always subject to the Constitution. Many have argued that Trump’s ban is unconstitutional because—as the president himself has repeatedly said—it’s intended to ban Muslims, and should be regarded as prohibited religious discrimination.

But here’s the problem for those making the argument: It’s firmly established U.S. law that the rights of the Constitution belong only to Americans. The U.S. Army can strip enemy combatants of weapons without offending the Second Amendment right to carry firearms. It can billet troops in private dwellings overseas without offending the Third Amendment. The NSA can intercept foreign communications without regard to the Fourth Amendment. The U.S. courts do not hear cases from foreign nationals who complain their due process rights under the Fifth Amendment have somehow been infringed. And so through the gamut.

Where do foreign nationals then acquire their supposed First Amendment right to enter the United States without religious discrimination?

The answer offered by Judge Derrick Watson’s opinion is a judicial reach of a kind that might sound clever to the student editors of an academic law review—but that should worry all Americans in real life. By barring foreign Muslims, the opinion argues, the Trump administration has signaled disfavor of domestic Muslims as well, thereby violating their First Amendment rights to religious equality.

Not only that! Watson’s opinion further contends that this argument is so convincing that it is “highly likely” to prevail on the ultimate merits—and for that reason, that he is justified in issuing immediately a temporary restraining order against Trump’s ban.

This double argument is bold, to put it mildly.

What it does, in effect, is globalize the First Amendment (and possibly other amendments too) provided only that a fellow adherent of that religion live inside the United States.

This approach is so ambitious and so new that it renders incredible. Judge Derrick Watson’s claimed certitude that the plaintiffs are “highly likely” to prevail. Their chances are at best touch-and-go; at worst, probably doomed.

Frankly, under any other president than Donald Trump, it seems impossible that a federal judge would have expressed such certitude—or granted their requested order. The federal courts have historically granted large deference to presidential power over immigration and naturalization. The Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2015 that the president could deny a visa to an alien for no reason at all! In answer to an alien who contended that the U.S. government had violated her due process rights, the court ruled:

She claims that the Government denied her due process of law when, without adequate explanation of the reason for the visa denial, it deprived her of her constitutional right to live in the United States with her spouse. There is no such constitutional right.

Why then did Watson accept the far-fetched argument that aliens can acquire First Amendment rights at second-hand? Watson candidly confessed that he was swayed by the avowals by the president and his senior aides that their motives were indeed based on irrational religious discrimination. “In this highly unique case,” he wrote, “the record provides strong indications that the national security purpose is not the primary purpose for the travel ban.” He could not overlook “significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order and its related predecessor.”

To amend an old saying: Bad presidents make bad law. Because President Trump is behaving in an unprecedented way, Watson feels called upon also to behave in an unprecedented way. In order to defend a constitutional value—equal treatment of all American religions—Watson has issued an order that corrodes the constitutional system itself. It’s a lose-lose proposition, because either way a constitutional norm would be weakened before the world.

Watson’s imaginative reasoning in Hawaii v. Trump asserts a new judicial power to disregard formal law if the president’s personal words create a basis for mistrusting his motives. In the age of Trump, many will be sympathetic to this judicial power—but it is crammed with dangers, too. Not the least of those dangers is that this new rule creates incentives for the president to race to cram the courts with his people in the possibly brief window in which his party controls the Senate. If presidential power ebbs and flows according to the opinions the judges of the moment happen to feel about the character of the president of the moment, the day has come when the courts too must become a prize of hyper-partisan politics.

I’ve argued before in this space that Donald Trump is a uniquely dangerous president. Watson has now revealed to us another of those dangers. In response to the danger posed by Trump, other American power holders will be tempted to jettison their historic role too, and use any tool at hand—no matter how doubtfully legitimate—to stop him. Those alternative power holders may even ultimately win. But in winning, they may discover themselves in the same tragic position as that Vietnam-era army officer who supposedly said: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Frum makes a good argument then degenerates into Trump hate: Trump is to blame for the abuses of Trump haters. Frum also forgets that it was Obama who stacked the courts in D.C. and the 4th Circuit among others. Frum lives in a deluded world where only now have the courts been debased as “a prize of hyper-partisan politics” and he blames Trump for this degenerate state of affairs when the problem began long before President Trump took the oath of office.

We’ll dissent from the dissent in one respect. The “personal attacks” on the district court and the 9th Circuit are entirely justified precisely because the district court and the 9th Circus acted as a “political forum” not a court of LAW.
———-
Correct: when they function as judges they are entitled to the respect that inures to the judicial function

However, there is range of acceptable judicial opinion

Which is governed by the record in court, the cannons of construction and stare decisis.

When judges forsake these constraints, and aspire to the role of philosopher king untethered.

Then they lose that shield, and are open to the same criticism as befits a politician.

Put differently, they cannot behave like a politician and pretend to be a judge.

The DoJ just delivered documents to congressional committees responding to their request for information that could shed light on President Donald Trump’s claims that former President Barack Obama ordered U.S. agencies to spy on him. Reuters reports that a congressional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the House Intelligence Committee was examining the documents and might issue a public statement about them later on Friday.

Lemonhead introduces Flannery as a former assistant district attorney for the Southern District of New York

Perhaps he is–or rather was

But one thing is quite clear when you look at the golden curls, the big bow tie and the effete bearing

He is a Harvard Man

As such he takes his shots at Trump, eulogizes the jackal in Hawaii who issued the clearly erroneous decision

And then he attempts to pre-empt what Alan will say, namely that the decision was fatally flawed

Not because of any legitimate legal reason, but because Alan is a strong supporter of Israel ergo anti Muslim

The fucker will not stop talking even as Alan tries to object

Finally, Alan gets his shot, explains his position on the merits, call Flannery an anti Semitic bigot

And tells Lemonhead to never invite him on a panel with this bigot

(Note: going all the way back to Harvard Dean Langdell–inventor of the case book method, Harvard has had a strong anti Semitic bias. In fact, when Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court in the early twentieth century, Langdell led the charge against him on precisely those grounds. If you want to know how virulent that virus is, watch Flannery. It is not course, it proceeds by inuendo, and it assume that if I accuse you of bad faith nicely, and I am a Harvard man, then its no harm no foul. Fortunately, Alan refused to sit still for it, and even though Flannery took it with a stiff upper lip, I suspect by now his lip is bleeding.)

I applaud Alan Dershowitz for taking down an elitist ex prosecutor who is a post modern Kim Filbey with his painted smile and his dainty bow tie, for sure a metrosexual Harvard product, who is not only contemptuous of our president, supportive of the illegal decisions by the 2 judges, but tells the audience to dismiss Alans objections on the grounds that Alan is pro Israel. Alan calls him exactly what he is, namely an anti Semitic bigot, and tells Lemonhead that he never wants to appear on a show ever again with this anti Semitic bigot.